Chapter Five. What He is Reading.

I was never a reader. When I attended Blomidon U. (the fictional institution invented by my author) I majored in English literature, because you had to major in something. I wasn't good at math and had no interest in anything scientific. Couldn't carry a tune and didn't play any musical instruments. So English was it, the default degree...

I shouldn't say that, the reason I majored in English was to get into acting. Really to attract the attention of someone from the local theatre company, the Players of Good Cheer. The doyenne of the GCP, Mrs. Elspeth Davenport, taught a Theatre Arts course for second year students. While biding my time I joined the campus Drama Society and appeared in a couple of productions hoping the influential Mrs. E., or perhaps one of her lieutenants from the company, would notice me.

Meanwhile Arthur, who was in his second year and taking Mrs. E.'s course, was already being wooed by her. He had appeared as Iago and as an Irish king in some play by Yeats. (The Irish Renaissance was still a going concern at Blomidon in 1976.) He was also a member of the musical theatre group, not that he could carry a tune either. I did not manage to attract the attention of Mrs. E., but I did the next best thing, I attraced the attention of Arthur, and when he dropped out to join them he was able to use his rapidly-growing influence to get me in. So I dropped out too, midway through my second year.

My author reads, however. He tends to have six or seven books going at once. No wonder he never finds the time to write. Right now, he's working on:

Jacob's Room
The Ironic Christian's Companion
The Edda
The Complete Poems of Auden
Angus Wilson: A Biography
The Future of Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians
God Emperor of Dune

He is also a packrat when it comes to book purchases. He must have more than three hundred books that he's purchased in the past fifteen years which he has never gotten around to reading. He buys many of them cheap at library book sales, many from remaindered bins, but more than a few at full price.

This, I say, is an addiction. Let us call it Addiction Number 1 (of 7).

The Dune book he has read before. I could never understand how someone could reread a book. I could barely finish books the first time through. Life is short (if you have a life at all); why repeat experiences?

Anyhow, he's been rereading this Dune series, by Frank Herbert. In case you haven't heard of it, it's science fiction. I read the first novel when I was at Blomidon. It was a bit of a fad then, like Lord of the Rings, everyone had to read it once. It was about a desert planet where water is extremely scarce, but everyone is addicted to a drug called Spice, which is a valuable commodity in the galaxy and which is produced somehow by the planet Dune's terrifying giant sandworms (I have this vague recollection it was their shit). This drug induces visions of the future in some, and they can use those visions to gain power. As, unwillingly, does Paul Atreides; and more deliberately his son Leto, who starts to transform himself very slowly into one of the sandworms by the end of the third book. (So I hear. I never made it to the end of the first. But there were some really cool scenes in it of the desert people hitching rides on the sandworms.)

My author didn't actually like these books the first time through. (And yet he's reading them again!) They seemed to preach a form of sociobiology, suggesting that survival of the fittest is the only real motivating force in the universe and determines all other values. Herbert also had nasty things to say about male homosexuals in the book he is currently reading - he suggested that it was a form of arrested adolescence, and was what held armies together and thus caused wars and other forms of violence such as rape. Being the insecure and easily offended little fag my author was, he really became incensed when he read that. But Herbert probably lifted that word for word out of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Sexual Revolution (Another book I started but didn't finish. It was much less exciting than its title implies. There were no pictures.)

The title character of God Emperor of Dune is one of those annoying "mouthpiece" characters whom authors use to voice their own (presumed to be authoritative) opinions. Leto is an exceptional example of the type, beng 3,500 years old, having total recall of all his ancestral memories back to ancient Egypt, which means that Everything He Says Is Right.

But my author is much older now, and is able to take these things in stride. He's enjoying the series for its scope - the first novel is set over 12,000 years in the future, and then the fourth novel leaps ahead another 3,500. He likes the space opera aspects of it. He is not enamored of some of the ideas but does not find him getting as defensive about them as he originally did.
I refuse to be a mouthpiece for him, however. I find the most fascinating thing about Dune is the idea that everyone isn't simply a single personality but is a composite of all their ancestral memories and personalities.

But why stop at ancestors? There's also us. The unwritten, the unalive. The so-called "fantasies". We insist on our right to survive as well.